New England Patriots 23, Baltimore Ravens 17
JH: First announcement, we have a major injury of Nick Boyle. He's going to be done for the season unfortunately with that play where he got hit on his knee. So that's the major injury. Any other injuries, we'll just have to wait and see until tomorrow how we come out of this thing.
Okay. What questions you have?
Q. When you lost Brandon Williams and already having Calais Campbell out, how big of a challenge or how difficult was it? Do you think that affected the run defense there?
JH: I'm sure it affected it. It's impossible to measure it, Jamison, but I'm sure it had an impact there.
Q. We saw you had a number of troubles again with the snap this week. Did you have a sense of why that was happening and what you might be able to do about it going forward?
JH: Well, I mean, I don't know if you guys -- I guess you guys weren't here, but why it was happening was the balls were wet and rain was coming down really hard. That's not an excuse. I mean, they still have to make the snaps. They made their snaps. I think that's the main reason.
Q. Was D.J. Fluker a performance issue? Did you feel like you were better off with Mekari at right tackle or was that injury-related?
JH: We were doing what we felt was the best thing. We're trying to find the right combination there right now in terms of being successful and that's why we made that move at that time.
It's not the end for D.J. at all. Just that game, this night, we felt like that was going to give us the best chance.
Q. What went into the thought process on the fourth and one, both to go for it and to use the wildcat with Mark Ingram?
JH: To go for it was fourth and one. We can go back and look at the circumstance exactly, but I think that's pretty obvious go-for-it situation there with the score being what it was.
The wildcat, that's a play we've been practicing. We have different plays. That wasn't the exact same play that you saw that was called that you saw in Houston. But obviously that's part of our offense and we have different plays off of that we think give some a good chance to convert that fourth and one, and we didn't have a good snap there and that's what cost us on that play.
Q. What did you see on their trick play? Their passing game had not been firing too well the last few weeks. Were you on alert that they might try something like that?
JH: Oh, yeah. We talked about it all week. We practiced it. I think we had it covered it but Patrick just hesitated just a little bit. I would probably call that just a rookie mistake in terms of uncertainty in that situation and he was a guy in coverage area, and he had his guy. He was on his guy. Hesitated just a step or two, and that gave Burkhead a chance to get in position.
The throw, the catch, was pretty good. With the weather the way it was, and tear-dropping that ball and Burkhead, he's a really good receiving running back and he made a really nice play on it, and that's what happened.
Q. Do you have any update on Brandon Williams and Terrell Bonds? I thought Bonds may have been carted off, as well.
JH: We'll know tomorrow on other injuries beside Nick.
Q. Not to belabor the injury issue, but big picture-wise, you guys have taken a lot of hits at different positions as far as injuries. How much are injuries a concern with the amount they are amounting to right now?
JH: Jamison, I don't know how to answer that, how much are they concerned. What did you want, a percentage? It's an issue, for sure. You don't want injuries.
I mean, these guys, these are contact injuries, most of them. These are guys in piles. Guys getting landed on. Guys getting hit. That's football. That's what it is. You're going to have these things. That's it.
So we just have to overcome them. I don't think it does anybody any good to sit there and say, well, it's this degree of a problem. Teams have them and guys are going to have to step up and they are going to step up. They will step up and they'll play well and we'll be in good shape. I'm not worried about guys stepping up. That's their job and there will be an opportunity for the guys until the guys come back. And most of those guys, a lot of those guys will be coming back with the exception of Nick so far.
That's really the answer. You know it's the answer. It's the only answer I can give because that's the truth. That's the reality of it and we'll be lining up against a team next week that is going to try to run the ball on us and we're going to have to be up to the task to get it stopped.
Q. Did you expect them to be as run-heavy as they were? Seemed like you made some adjustments in the second half. Can you explain what you do to counter that?
JH: We did expect them to do that. It wasn't any really scheme things. Sometimes we were in man coverage and they will run crack tosses against man coverage because you don't have an h-player out there and you still have to be able to beat the crack blocks and go chase them down.
We did not do a good enough job of that on those plays. On the inside runs, those are just plays where you've got to play better. You've got to do a better job on the inside runs. That's not something that we are okay with at all, and we just did a better job of playing them. We might have lined up in a different front a few times in the second half. We might have moved a guy here and there. Those are just adjustments that we made but those aren't keys.
The keys are how you play the runs. The fronts that we played in the first half were good fronts to stop those runs. They shouldn't have come through there like they did. They were pretty consistently getting four and five yards on first down when they ran those inside plays in the first half, and I thought like we did do a better job of those in the second half.
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